A presidential succession fraught with peril.

Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika returned to Algiers on July 16 after three months in a hospital in Paris. His health will prevent him from running for reelection in April, and it’s unclear whether he can run the country until then. As a result, the contest over his succession is already gearing up, and the Islamists are first out of the starting blocks. The United States and the European Union—along with China, a major presence in energy-rich Algeria—are closely monitoring this latest round in the continuing struggle over the Islamists’ role in government and society.

The Obama administration must have been hearing some awfully threatening noises from the business community lately, because its unilateral delay of Obamacare’s employer mandate, from 2014 to 2015, is otherwise very difficult to explain. The delay is an embarrassing move for the White House and will create some serious new headaches for Obamacare’s defenders.

Following in the footsteps of other TWS contributors who've run for Congress (e.g., Jim Webb in 2006 and Tom Cotton in 2012), Quin Hillyer has thrown his hat in the ring for the GOP nomination in the First Congressional District of Alabama, where incumbent Jo Bonner announced yesterday he'll be resigning as of August 15.

“We want this [election] to be free and fair. There’s a lot of ways to, of course, define that.”

Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, the Democratic nominee for the South Carolina First Congressional District special election, is listed twice on today's ballot. Colbert-Busch is also the nominee of the Working Families party.

The special election is today. Here's a screen shot of the ballot those South Carolina voters will see today, courtesy of the South Carolina State Election Commission:

As we survey the political wreckage of 2012, it’s worth highlighting once again that Republicans lost the presidential election for two main reasons: They failed to get their best candidates to run, and their eventual nominee failed to make the case to voters. The result was a relatively lopsided defeat. In fact, if Mitt Romney had managed to swing the margin by 5 points in his direction in each and every state, he still would have lost (272 electoral votes to 266).

As hard as it is to believe, it’s been only a little over three weeks since Election Day. But there are already plenty of signs that Republicans are learning many of the wrong lessons from that debacle.

We heard throughout the campaign of President Obama’s “all of the above” energy policy. That was then. This is now. About 48 hours after he was assured of reelection, the president’s Interior Department issued a plan to close to oil shale development 1.6 million acres of federal land in the West to oil.

Two thoughts for those TWS readers who—for some reason!—may be a bit down in the dumps, and especially for those who may have spent considerable time and effort trying to secure a better outcome on Election Day 2012.